Time to put the Kanji to bed?

Dialect: A language without an Army to back it up. 

It’s that time of year again. Every year around this time the Japan Association of Kanji Aptitude Test  announces the kanji of the year. The announcement is made in Kyoto at the famous Kiyomizu-dera temple through a priest who writes the chosen kanji on a big white board.

The kanji of the year 2012 was announced on December 13:

                             KIZUNA

Kizuna means bonds, bonding. This kanji was chosen through an annual survey of about 490 thousand Japanese. 12.4% of respondents have proposed the kanji Kizuna which made it the most popular one for the year 2011. The word Kizuna often was used to express solidarity and support for the victims of the 3/11 disaster.

The kanji ranking second and third were for disaster and  for shaking/trembling. All the other kanji therefore also related to the tsunami of March 11.

Which got me to thinking about a recent posting over at The Economist regarding the Chinese Language-another language that relies on the pictorial characters-and whether the continued use of those characters is an impediment to the advancement and assimilation of the Chinese into the greater world society.  Most Chinese ( and from henceforth-when I use the word “Chinese”-you can substitute “Japanese” and the meaning will still be the same).

Mr. Johnson makes a couple of very valid points:

In brief, Chinese traditionalists believe:

1) Chinese is one language with dialects.
2) Chinese is best written in the character-based hanzi system.
3) All Chinese read and share the same writing system, despite speaking in different ways.

Western linguists tend to respond:

1) Chinese is not a language but a family; the “dialects” are not dialects but languages.
2) Hanzi-based writing is unnecessarily difficult; the characters do not represent “ideas” but “morphemes” (small and combinable units of meaning, like the morphemes of any language). Pinyin (the standard Roman system) could just as easily be used for Chinese. Puns, wordplay and etymology might be sacrificed, but ease of use would be enhanced.
3) Modern hanzi writing is basically Mandarin with the old characters in a form modified by the People’s Republic. Everyone else (Cantonese speakers, say) must either write Mandarin or significantly alter the system to write their own “Chinese”.

The simple truth is the Western Linguists have it right. English will become the lingua franca of our world, so the sooner the rest of the world gets on board,  the better off we will be. The whining in the comments on Johnson’s post about how the British Empire trampled other languages is just whining. Nial Ferguson is more than right when he says that ,  “The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity . The challenge for the U.S., he argues, is for it to use its undisputed power as a force for positive change in the world and not to fall into some of the same traps as the British before them. “

Short version is-the world is based on English. Period-end of argument.

Now of course the Chinese and the Japanese don’t want to Romanize their languages, for one simple reason: They like to make it difficult for the foreigner ( and for that matter their own citizenry) to learn. Same is true for Arabic and Hebrew, Hindi and Thai, and for that matter Russian too.

Kanji ( or in its Mandarin form Hanzi) is a good means to present a lot of information visually-rather quickly. But the learning of it is nothing but sheer rote memorization. At least with Arabic and Hebrew there is a system of sorts-while I was in Israel, I picked up reading the signs (while not understanding them) in about 8 days or so. 22 letters can be learned a lot easier than 2000 or 3000.

Now the defenders of Kanji are out there-and they are determined to hold their ground:

To any educated Chinese, Pinyin is significantly more difficult to read. Virtually every Chinese word share the same pronunciation with many other words that it is impossible to tell apart in Pinyin. To read sentences in pinyin, you have to guess which Chinese word each pinyin corresponds to until the whole sentence makes sense.

Westerners may find reading/writing hanzi difficult to learn. It is, after all, a completely different system from Latin-based languages. But once you learn to read it, it is much easier than trying to translate pinyin to the actual Chinese word.

Substitute the word Romanji and you have the Japanese point of view.

And they do have a point. I have found in the learning of Japanese that it is actually a step backwards to start from Romanji to learn the language-its easier and facilitates learning the Kanji,  if you start straight from Hiragana and Katakana and move forward from that foundation. But its based on a flawed goal-that I have to assume the additonal burden of having to learn to read the language as well as speak it. I never labored under such a handicap while learning ( and now re-learning) German. Neither do learners of any of the other romanized languages. Ataturk probably heard the same argument from many of his fellow Turks when he ordered Turkish romanized in 1928.  Several generations later-it hasn’t stopped Turks from learning Turkish.

It’s not easier to translate-its just easier to read. What Mr , ” I love Chinese Characters” is not telling you  is that by deriving the language from the visual characters, it has created an unacceptable situation where there are lots of words with similar pronuciations. Only by seeing the characters are proper distinctions made.

That’s not to say English does not have similar situations-but it is much easier to distinguish by context. Can you think of any other reason Chinese and Japanese subtitle TV shows in their own language?

Spoken Japanese is not that difficult to learn, save for the incredibly difficult process of knowing which polite froms to use when ( Keigo). I suspect its probably the same with Chinese. Reading the language well on the other hand-and being able to discern nuance and intimation-is a much harder proposition. I would submit that many Westerners would agree with me-and even those who can speak the language well are probably not as adept at reading as they would like to be.

As one commenter pointed out-people generally learn foreign languages as a survival mechanism. If you want to function in Japan-you have to learn some level of Japanese. Those who say they never needed to are kidding themselves-or they are fine with limiting themselves in where they go and what they do. Same is true in China I think-but its also true in reverse. If the Chinese want to be a dominant force as they claim to be-they will have to take on more and more English. ( Dear Korean friends-please make a note of this.)

Its only a one way street. And the lanes are not going to be reversed.

Rule Britannia!